Owing to their high efficiency, LEDs are being used increasingly in LED lamps for general lighting or in automobile headlamps. It is then often the case that a plurality of LED lamps are operated next to one another, in which case the LED lamps may respectively contain a plurality of LEDs.
So that different LED lamps arranged next to one another offer a homogeneously colored appearance, it is desirable for the radiation emitted by the different LED lamps respectively to have the same color locus. In the manufacture of LEDs, however, it cannot be ruled out that minor color differences of the individual LEDs may occur, particularly in the case of LEDs from different production batches. For this reason, LEDs are often grouped by the LED manufacturer before delivery (so-called “binning”), a group of LEDs (the so-called “bin”) being distinguished, for example, in that all LEDs of this group have the same color locus. If, in the production of LED lamps, only LEDs of a single group are used, this ensures that all lamps equipped with these LEDs have the same color locus. In this case, however, it is necessary that the customer of the LED manufacturer, who further processes the individual LEDs to form LED lamps, respectively only uses LEDs from the same LED group so that all lamps of different manufacturing batches have the same color locus. Alternatively, it would also be conceivable for a lamp manufacturer deliberately to select a plurality of LEDs from different LED groups with a different color locus to equip an LED lamp such that the lamp containing a plurality of LEDs overall has the desired target color locus. This would have the advantage that the lamp manufacturer could use LEDs from groups with a different color locus, but on the other hand leads to increased production outlay since LEDs from different packaging units would have to be used to equip an individual LED lamp.
On this basis, it could thus be helpful to provide a method for combining LEDs in a packaging unit by which LED components having a plurality of LEDs from the packaging unit and/or from different packaging units can have the least possible differences in terms of color locus.